There’s been a lot of talk about how pro Apple computers have been over the last few years, in particular the MacBook range. The footprint got smaller, ports disappeared, keyboards were riddled with issues and some of the vital stuff such as drives and memory sizes were regarded as pitiful compared to other portable computers.
What pro audio users want is power, low fan noise, and ports to connect stuff and Apple seemed to be taking these things away on each iteration of the MacBook Pro computers. In doing so Apple left itself open to criticism from the pro community. Of course, many Apple users dealt with the inconvenience of dongles and other ways to work around the limitations, considering the Mac hardware and software ecosystem so good that it was worth the inconvenience.
When it came to desktops, Apple delivered with the Mac Pro 7,1, a beast of a machine that when fully loaded could pack a serious punch. The Mac Pro has received a lot of love from the pro audio community. It has subsequently been widely adopted in studios around the world.
Then Apple announced the M1 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, powered with the new Apple Silicon M1 SoC technology. The new M1 chips pack a serious punch and got us all excited, but then the specs were announced and it seemed that Apple hadn’t learned their lesson about making a laptop for the professional audio user. Low port count, external monitor issues, and small memory offerings. When we first reviewed the MacBook Pro M1 soon after launch we were clear that the first machines were the starter and the main course was to come.
Apple then announced the new more powerful MacBook computers in October 2021, powered with the new M1 Pro and M1 Mac SoC. Even better Apple offered these new devices with things we had been asking for - ports, memory, and hard drives that made sense. So have the audio community really got a pro machine at last?
Russ Hughes and James Richmond have taken delivery of the new Apple MacBook Pro powered with the new M1 Max SoC. Here are their first impressions of the new MacBook Pro… is it really pro?
James Richmond
It’s here. My new notebook computer, a 2021 MacBook Pro 14. I ordered this machine the moment it was announced at last week’s Apple event.
It arrived a few hours ago so I am still getting everything set up but let me just say ‘WOW’. This thing is freaking ridiculous.
The new machine has a 10 core M1 Max processor, 64GB RAM, 2TB internal storage. This replaces a 2017 15” MacBook Pro with a 3.1 GHz and 16GB RAM. Yes, the one with the annoying keyboard. I’m not going to compare the new machine to this device though.
I want to talk a bit about how it compares to my primary studio computer, a beastly 16 core 3.2 GHz i7 Mac Pro tower with 192GB of memory. Is that even fair? However, the Mac Pro is perhaps a redundant one now too.
Geekbench 5 reports the laptop’s single-core score of 1729, against the tower’s single-core score of 1129. That is 35% faster. From a laptop that cost about 40% of what the tower did. That is remarkable.
Multicore performance reported a score of 11604 against the tower’s score of 13920, the tower being about 17% faster. This is still very respectable indeed.
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reported read and write speeds around 5500 mBit/s roughly double what the Mac Pro is capable of. Simply astonishing. In a device weighing around 1.5kg. And these scores are very much provisional because I ran the tests somewhat against the way they should be done, which is once the machine is otherwise idle.
The tests were run whilst the machine was already busy copying data in the background. I expect both the single and multicore scores to go up once the install is completed, and disc speed will increase as well, I imagine.
What Does This Mean?
Well, for a start these new MacBook Pros are ridiculously fast and capable. Perhaps to the point where we can simply not worry about how fast they are and just use them. The power feels endless.
I’ve installed Logic and Pro Tools and even my most processor-heavy sessions run perfectly. Processor usage is incredibly low. Fan noise is entirely absent. Heat, an issue with the previous Intel-based design, is non-existent. It has enough ports, sensibly adding HDMI and SD card support
So, does this means I’ll be getting rid of the tower and relying just on this laptop? No, or at least not for now. I still rely on Avid Pro Tools HDX and there is no way to use these cards without using an expansion chassis.
Also, the Apple Silicon/M1 rollout is still very much a work in progress, I wouldn’t want to be relying on this device as my studio hub until it is well and truly a settled matter.
Finally, I do prefer a tower format as a studio computer, you can expand storage beyond what is possible in the notebook format and add other cards.
This takes nothing away from this new notebook though, which is an astonishing piece of engineering. It will probably take me another day or so to get software installed and configured the way I like it and then I can really put it through its paces.
I will be very interested when Apple releases an M1 Max tower too though.
Russ Hughes
I’ve had my machine, a 10 core M1 Max processor, 64GB RAM, 1TB internal storage, for a matter of hours. I’ve already had the joy of using M1 since I also have an M1 13” MacBook Pro, acquired days after Apple announced M1 last year. You can read more about my impressions of that machine here.
So first impressions of the new MacBook Pro M1 Max?
It’s built like a pro machine, it looks and feels like the weighty older MacBook Pros we all loved so much, it’s moved away from Apple’s obsession with making everything thinner. This really is substance over style… yes from Apple.
We now have a real power connector in the form of a new MagSafe, which comes with a pro feel braided power cable - so perhaps the days of the cable breaking at the connectors are gone too? Even better there are three Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) connectors that can be used for;
Charging
DisplayPort
Thunderbolt 4 (up to 40Gb/s)
USB 4 (up to 40Gb/s)
In ADDITION (yes addition, we’re still talking about an Apple MacBook 😉) we also have an HDMI 2.0 connector, which means no more messing around trying to connect multiple monitors. There’s also a SDXC card slot for reading and writing to the popular camera card format. Finally, there’s a high spec headphone socket with the option to use high impedance headphones, more on that soon.
Suffice to say the new keyboard feels better and again more solid. The speakers are also better sounding than previous MacBooks, with more bottom end and greater stereo width.
I’ve not had the unit long enough to be able to run any meaningful power test like James, they will be coming in the next weeks and months as compatibility improves. However I’ve run Geekbench and below are the comparisons between the MacBook Pro 13” M1, the new MacBook Pro Max 14” and my original fully loaded 16” MacBook Pro Intel i9.
Of course, as James has already mentioned with these new MacBook Pros we get staggering performance gains. When we say staggering we mean it. AnandTech ran some serious performance tests on the new machines and this is what they concluded;
On the CPU side, doubling up on the performance cores is an evident way to increase performance – the competition also does so with some of their designs. How Apple does it differently, is that it not only scaled the CPU cores, but everything surrounding them. It’s not just 4 additional performance cores, it’s a whole new performance cluster with its own L2. On the memory side, Apple has scaled its memory subsystem to never before seen dimensions, and this allows the M1 Pro & Max to achieve performance figures that simply weren’t even considered possible in a laptop chip. The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
Of course in the past to get serious power out of a MacBook Pro meant two things; heat and fan noise, of course fans follow heat as night follows day so that was an inevitable problem we had to find ways around too. However, the Apple Silicon SoC processors run at around 40 degrees even when pushed hard in our previous tests. These new machines have even better cooling than the first generation M1 Macs and to get the fan to run on one of them was almost impossible. The new Macs are seriously cool machines in more ways than one.
As a small taste of things to come, we quickly created a purely unscientific test session in Pro Tools of around 700 tracks using stock Avid plugins. This is a short video showing a large Pro Tools 2020.10 session running on the Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max 14". Buffer was set at 128 samples, the MacBook Pro has 64GB of unified memory. Pro Tools is running using Rosetta on macOS Monterey 12.0.1, an unsupported OS. Fan noise was non-existent. There is no sound on this video
Things That Make The New MacBook Pro A Pro Machine
I’ve made a short bullet list of the things that tick the boxes for me that are on these new MacBook Pros.
Modular connections for most ports, every port except HDMI and the SD card
Huge quiet fans - if you ever hear them!
Thunderbolts now has a bus per port - 40gb throughput directly to the SOC
Fast charging - 50% in 30 minutes
Headphone port is louder and you may not need an external headphone DAC
Magsafe means less chance of computer flying across room
The SD card slot for moving data on and off the Mac.
They are REALLY fast!
What do we want in a pro computer? Speed, quiet operation and connectivity. The MacBook Pro has all of these.
How Do The New MacBook Pro Fair In Repair?
The masters of teardown iFixit teardown the new 2021 MacBook Pro to see how repairable they are.
In-Depth Tests Coming Soon
Check back in the coming weeks as we hook up all manner of studio hardware and software and put the new MacBook Pro M1 Pro and Max through their paces. Suffice to say, we doubt we’ll be disappointed.
If you are expecting delivery or are planning to order a new Mac which is powered with an Apple Silicon processor or that uses macOS 12 Monterey then make sure you check out our compatibility guides before making them the centre of your studio setup.